Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Footer no follow links
-
Just interested to know when putting links at the foot of the site some people use no-follow tags. I'm thinking about internal pages and social networks.
Is this still necessary or is it an old-fashioned idea?
-
I usually use nofollow for links that point to pages like "Privacy policy" or "Legal advice", and noindex in those pages.
I don't do it for authority, I do it for duplicated content, this pages a lot of times have very similar content to the same pages in other sites.
-
Hi seoman, it's definitely outdated and was never accurate to begin with. The "nofollow" attribute was always designed to be applied to external links and modern advice is to never apply a nofollow link to your own internal links. If you're concerned about passing authority from a page like your homepage down into your footer links instead of more important pages, you should know that Google tags the links on your site so that they're weighted differently, i.e. a link in your body content is worth more than a link in your footer, image links don't pass as much authority, etc.
In short, I don't think you're going to move the needle by altering your footer links to nofollow.
-
Hi,
It depends if I don't want to pass link juice on internal pages like 'privacy policy' or 'Damage policy' or any social network including other external website link I would use nofollow and If I will place any important page in footer(internal link) I will not use nofollow.
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Rel=canonical and internal links
Hi Mozzers, I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question: How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A? I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not. I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk0 -
Link juice through URL parameters
Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?
Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau9 -
Does 302 pass link juice?
Hi! We have our content under two subdomains, one for the English language and one for Spanish. Depending on the language of the browser, there's a 302 redirecting to one of this subdomains. However, our main domain (which has no content) is receiving a lot of links - people rather link to mydomain.com than to en.mydomain.com. Does the 302 passing any link juice? If so, to which subdomain? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bodaclick0